III. The Terror and the Insider: The Religious Parallel

To the insider, to the true believer, the revolution appears as a very different thing in this crisis period, though one may guess that for some of the less ardent insiders much of what has been said about the outsiders begins, after a while, to hold true also. The revolution begins to take too much out of him, and he begins to have his hesitations and his doubts, to be bored with the endless ceremonies, deputations, committees, tribunals, militia work, and the other chores necessary to achieve the reign of virtue on earth. He, too, becomes an outsider. But the true faithful stay to the end, to the block, the guillotine, the firing-squad, or exile.

Now to this insider it would seem that the service of the revolution supplies many of the satisfactions commonly supplied by what we call religion. This analogy with religion has been frequently made. It has been applied, not only to the English revolution where its fitness is undisputed, but also to the French and Russian revolutions. Since both Jacobins and Bolsheviks were violently hostile to Christianity and boasted themselves atheists or at least deists, this analogy has given a great deal of offense both to Christians and to their enemies. For the Marxist in particular the assertion that his behavior has similarities with the behavior of men under the acknowledged influence of religion is like a red rag to a bull. Nor is the Marxist wholly unjustified in his anger, for the glib phrase, “Oh, the Communists are just another fanatical sect,” is frequently thrown out by shallow conservatives as at once a reproach and a dismissal. Actually, to judge from past experience, it would seem that large numbers of men can be brought to do certain very important things of the kind the Communists want to have done only under the influence of what we call religion; that is, some pattern of more or less similar sentiments, moral aspirations, and ritualistic practices. Marxism as a religion has already got a great deal done; Marxism as a “scientific theory” alone would hardly have got beyond the covers of Das Kapital and the learned journals.

But the dispute sketched above is endless, and we are not rash enough to suppose we can settle it. Those who use the term “religion” in this connection seem to us to be trying to describe a phenomenon of the world of sense-experience, one that needs to be integrated with other phenomena of revolutions. It is certainly true, however, that this use apparently arouses in many persons emotions unfavorable to the continued objective study of the subject. Anyone who could suggest a neutral term as effectively pointing to the same phenomena as does the term “religion” would be performing a great service for sociology. No such term at present existing, we shall have to continue to use the word “religion.” We must insist that this word does not refer necessarily and exclusively to a formally theistic cult like Christianity; and above all, that it does not necessarily imply belief in the “supernatural.” We take it that in the present analysis the important thing about a religious belief is that under its influence men work very hard and excitedly in common to achieve here or somewhere an ideal, a pattern of life not at the moment universally—or even largely—achieved. Religion attempts to close in favor of the best of human hopes the gap between what men are and what men would like to be; at least in its young and active phase, it will not for a moment admit that such a gap can long exist.

To discern the element of religion in the behavior of the ardent extremist is not to deny the existence of economic motives. Indeed, at this stage some of the most acute phases of the struggle among classes are to be noticed, and form one of the uniformities we can clearly consider established. Whatever the place of economic class struggles in the days just before the revolution—and in our four revolutions it takes varied forms by no means adequately summed up in phrases such as “feudal nobility,” “middle class,” and “proletariat”—once the revolution gets going these class struggles have at least one phase common in all four societies. The property of many, if not most, of those openly and stubbornly identified with the beaten parties is confiscated for the benefit of the successful parties, identified as “the people.” Furthermore, as the different moderate groups are defeated their property, too, is commonly confiscated in the same way.

In the English revolution the Royalists lost a large part of their property, mostly in land; and though lay Presbyterians were not as a rule subjected to confiscation of property unless they were actively on the wrong side in politics, there was a great deal of easing Presbyterians and other unacceptable ecclesiastics out of their livings. Laurence Washington, a clergyman, the father of the John of Virginia, and a direct ancestor of George, was “plundered” as the phrase went in 1643, cause he was said to have said that the parliamentary army had more papists in it than there were around the King. That is to say, he was deprived of his living. We need hardly be reminded that Loyalist property was confiscated during the American revolution. Indeed the late J. F. Jameson concludes that in a quiet way—quiet at least for revolutions—the American revolution effected in its whole course a very sensible democratization, or spreading into smaller units, of ownership of property in this country. Both in France and in Russia the revolutions saw the confiscation primarily of land, but even in France to some extent also of capital, and their redistribution. We need not go into detail here on these agrarian problems. Sufficient to state that many of those who came to the top in the crisis period, both leaders and followers, had good reason to hope that by staying on top their economic status would be consistently better than it had been. This is true regardless of what theories and ideals, laissez-faire or Socialism, were appealed to as guiding the new distribution.

But though we must recognize the economic motive, as we recognize the drive to centralization to repel attacks from within and without, our picture is incomplete until we consider those elements unavoidably called religious. Partly because the economic and political elements are in their conventional sense familiar to most people nowadays, partly because these religious elements appear to be among the most important variables in the situation, we are here emphasizing them. They seem to be among the most important variables because their presence in an acute form gives a different and much more pervasive tone to the political and economic elements of struggle, which frequently occur by themselves in very similar form and even somewhat similar intensity in situations we do not commonly label revolutionary. It is also true that in the growth of Wesleyan Methodism in eighteenth-century England, for instance, in times not to be called revolutionary, one finds actively religious behavior among large numbers of people, behavior in many ways like that we are going to analyze in our revolutionary insider. But Wesleyanism was politically conservative on the whole, and not directed at a given social and political system. The whole point, indeed, of the three revolutions we are about to analyze is that religious enthusiasms, organization, ritual and ideas appear inextricably bound up with economic and political aims.

The insiders in all three of our complete revolutions, and indeed to a certain extent in the fourth, the American revolution, seem to have wished to put into life here on earth some of the order, the discipline, the contempt for the easy vices, which the Calvinist sought to put there. Indeed our first revolution, the English, is commonly labeled the Calvinist or Puritan revolution. Here we may expect a protest from the Communists, an indignant assertion that Marx put such Christian weaknesses as a desire to subdue the flesh well behind him, that his followers are all for an abundance of food and drink, and the other good things of this world for everybody. We shall return to that question in a moment. In the meantime we can begin to see some lurking ascetic tendency in Communism if we reflect on how indignant good Communists would be over the slogan “wine, women, and song for everybody.”

That the Puritans were in some sense puritanical we can take in stride as a reasonable assumption. Indeed, at present it is probably more useful to try to show that the historical Puritans both in old and new England were not quite the complete killjoys the school of H. L. Mencken would make them out to have been. As for the Jacobins, their legislation and above all their somewhat informal administration in 1793-94 had striking analogies with the kind of things the English Puritans tried to put over. The Jacobins were in principle against gambling, drunkenness, sexual irregularities of all sorts, ostentatious display of poverty, idleness, thieving, and of course in general all sorts of crimes. In practice they felt at liberty to enforce abstention from these vices and to insist with force on the carrying out of positive acts of virtue—such as selling goods always at the legal fixed maximum price, even if a little bootlegging seemed quite safe, attending celebrations in honor of the Supreme Being on décadi, expressing in public the opinion that William Pitt was a corrupt villain, and the English nation a lot of pathetic slaves. Such a system of action they sought to enforce by making each man his own detective, God’s own private spy, much as was said to have been done in Calvin’s own Geneva.

Those who chiefly did the prying were the members of the local clubs, urged on by the local leaders, just as with the Puritans it was the parish clergy, aided by the active elders of the church, who saw to it that the sheep were properly shepherded. The most undignified matters, apparently the most insignificant also, might under these conditions set a parish or a community on end. The first dissension in the English Separatist Church at Amsterdam, we are told, arose not over any point of doctrine or ritual, but over the lace on Mrs. Francis Johnson’s sleeve. One could find dozens of parallels for this in the behavior of the Jacobins. There was the lively debate in a little club in Normandy over the question whether citizen doctor X wasn’t making his professional calls on aristocrats too long, his calls on patriots too short. And the great row at Bourgoin when the secretary announced that he wasn’t going to wear the red Liberty cap because it didn’t become him. This shocking display of vanity overcoming patriotism unleashed the full fury of the virtuous Republicans of Bourgoin, and the secretary was lucky to escape with his life.

The other-worldliness of the Russian revolutionists affords a problem more apparent than important, or even real. It is quite true that “philosophically” modern Communism is based on materialism, that it denies the immortality of the soul and indeed the existence of a soul, that it insists men must be happy here on earth, enjoying the good things of this earth. But surely it is most important if you wish to understand the problems of men in society to find out what men do, how they behave, as well as what they say on paper or in the pulpit that they are doing, or want to do, or ought to do. It is also quite true that Communists, fellow-travelers, as the Communists like to call their sentimental followers among the intellectuals, and the brethren of the Left in general in this country tend to be extremely indignant when their behavior is analyzed as we propose to analyze it. Here, as so often, indignation is not refutation.

That the Bolshevik leaders were almost all ascetics is perhaps a commonplace. Lenin was notably austere and contemptuous of ordinary comfort, and at the height of his power his apartments in the Kremlin were of barrack-like simplicity. Some of Lenin’s sayings sound like the bourgeois Calvinists as analyzed by Max Weber, or even by Mr. R. H. Tawney: “Carry out an accurate and honest account of money, manage economically, don’t loaf, don’t steal, maintain the strictest discipline in labor.” Indeed, the general tone among the high command of Bolshevism was in those early years that of a consecrated and almost monastic group. In a Russia where men were starving or freezing it was for one thing pretty impolitic for leaders to look too sleek and well-fed. But just as the pressure of the war is not a complete explanation for the Terror, so neither necessity nor policy explains the asceticism of the Bolsheviks. They felt, as the Puritans had felt, that the ordinary vices and weaknesses of human beings are disgusting, that the good life cannot be led until they are eliminated. Early the Bolsheviks prohibited the national drink, vodka, and almost all the early soviets took steps against prostitution, gambling, night life, and so on. Theoretically the Bolsheviks thought women should be free, for instance, free from the shocking limitations bourgeois laws had put upon them; hence the notable freedom allowed in Russia as to marriage, divorce, abortion, and other phases of family and sex relationships. But the Bolsheviks did not intend by this that women were to be free to behave as they were sure they secretly behaved—or wanted to behave—in dissolute old bourgeois society. On the contrary, they expected their women to behave as they would behave in the classless society—and though vague, that is a pretty strict canon.

Even today, when apparently the crisis stage is over in Russia, there are numerous survivals of the intense asceticism of the true Communist party members of the crisis period. In their innocent book on Soviet Russia, the innocent Webbs declare that there is no asceticism in Russia, of course, and then go on and explain how the Comsomols (Communist Youth) are encouraged to take the pledge—not for any silly evangelical reasons, heavens, no, but because drinking anything alcoholic is “a breach of the rule requiring maintenance of perfect health.” Petting, too, is very definitely discouraged as unworthy of the Communist Youth, especially when it is done in public. “Nothing pornographic is allowed in literature or in any form of art. There is less public sex appeal in evidence in Russia than in any Western land.” Since the Webbs wrote this, the Russians seem to have relaxed a bit in their public restraints, and the Germans, in the freshness of their revolution, have gone very puritanical in such matters. Berlin, which used to provide the broadest range of sexual activity in the world, has now outwardly taken on a Lutheran and Teutonic virtue, while the existence of public prostitution in Moscow and Leningrad can hardly escape even visiting members of the British Labour party.

The Russians of old being notoriously dirty about their public places—almost as dirty as we Americans are—the new regime has made it a point of discipline that no litter, papers, and such-like truck be left in public parks, streets, and stations. Indeed, membership in the Communist party itself, always a very select and disciplined minority, demanded for years, and to a certain extent still demands, the exercise of a great deal of self-restraint, a willingness to live simply, to work hard, to conform to very high standards of personal morality. As usual in such circumstances, and as we have already noted for the Puritans and the Jacobins, self-restraint was apparently not enough, and there grew up in Russia all sorts of official and unofficial methods of spying, prying, checking-up on the actions of individuals, and controlling them by Terrorist methods. Many of these agencies are now serving the Stalinite reaction, as similar agencies in France and in England served the Thermidorean reaction and the Stuart restoration.

Now groups thoroughly disciplined into lives almost as unnaturally ascetic as those our Puritans, Jacobins, and Bolshevists sought to impose have existed for relatively long periods. The Spartiates contrived to support an almost heroic Communism for several centuries. But this discipline is of slow growth, intimately tied up with the kind of behavior in men that changes with geological slowness. A revolution cannot manufacture this kind of discipline overnight, and perhaps the violence—and here is meant rather spiritual violence than mere bloodshed—of the Terror is in some sense an overcompensation for the inability of the extremists to carry their ordinary brothers along with them. The Terror is a desperate overshooting of the mark. Again, the existence in individuals of a certain amount of inclination to meddle with their neighbor’s private affairs is probably a useful thing, part of what cements societies together. But here, too, the ardent revolutionists overshoot the mark and make life unbearable for their neighbors.

There are traces of this kind of organized asceticism, this crusade against the customary vices, even in the American revolution, where the crisis stage was never as intense as in our other revolutions. There were many restrictive measures justified chiefly as necessary to the efficient prosecution of the war against George III. There were others quite as obviously dictated by the traditions of middle-class Protestant ethics which had long been established in the Middle Colonies and in New England. But here and there one encounters the true accent of revolutionary idealism. Here is a passage worthy of Robespierre: “Titles are the offspring of monarchical and arbitrary governments. While the object of the present war with Great Britain was reconciliation, the titles of excellency, honorable, etc., were submitted to by the people of America, but since the Declaration of Independence, the colonies have divorced monarchy forever, and become free, independent states. It becomes then necessary to adopt the simple language of free governments.... Let us leave the titles of excellency and honorable to the abandoned servants of a tyrant King ... while we satisfy ourselves with beholding our senators, governors, and generals rich in real excellence and honor.”

The Baltimore Committee which in April, 1775, “recommended to the people of the county not to encourage or attend the approaching fair because of its tendency to encourage horse-racing, gaming, drunkenness, and other dissipation” was going beyond the strict necessities of the situation. Again we find a neat illustration from the pen of a Connecticut patriot writing in July, 1775: “Wednesday evening last, a number of ladies and gentlemen collected at a place called East Farms, in Connecticut, where they had a needless entertainment, and made themselves extremely merry with a good glass of wine. Such entertainments and diversions can hardly be justified upon any occasion; but at such a day as this, when everything around us has a threatening aspect, they ought to be discountenanced, and every good man should use his influence to suppress them.”

Our orthodox and successful extremists, then, are crusaders, fanatics, ascetics, men who seek to bring heaven to earth. No doubt many of them are hypocrites, career-seekers masquerading as believers, no doubt many of them climb on the band-wagon for selfish motives. Yet it is most unrealistic to hold that men may not be allowed to reconcile their interests with their ideas. Many an ardent and sincere follower of Robespierre, many a seeker after Calvinist truth, was able, with the best of conscience, to buy lands confiscated from the unrepublican or the ungodly. Our extremists are also, as the intimate details of their daily lives should convince us, for the most part quite ordinary people, with the loves and hatreds, aspirations and doubts, hopes and fears, of ordinary people. Once the crisis period is over, they will, save for the few born martyrs, cease to be crusaders, fanatics, ascetics. Their revolutionary beliefs will be softly cushioned in a comfortable ritual, will be a consolation and a habit rather than a constant prick of the ideal. But now, in the crisis period, they are in what we may call the active phase of a religion. Let us briefly take up some of the striking characteristics of this phase in our three societies.

Calvinism, Jacobinism, Marxism, are all rigidly deterministic. All believe that what happens here below is foreordained, predestined to follow a course which no mere human being can alter, least of all those who oppose respectively Calvinism, Jacobinism, or Marxism. In fact, the more priest and prelate storm and rage, the more certain is the Calvinists’ victory. The acts of aristocrats, traitors, Pitts and Cobourgs can but make the triumph of the French Republic greater. The harder the Rockefellers and the Morgans work, the more capitalistic their behavior, the sooner will come the inevitable glorious and final uprising of the proletariat. God for the Calvinist, Nature-Reason for the Jacobin, Dialectical or Scientific Materialism for the Marxist, provide comforting assurance that the believer is on the side that must win. Obviously the belief that you can’t lose will in most—not all—cases make you a better fighter.

Those whom God, Nature, or Science has chosen are quite willing to advertise the fact of this choice, and, indeed, display an inconsistency which is purely logical, and not at all of the emotions, in that they seem very anxious to help the inevitable come about. Rigid determinists are also usually ardent proselyters, presumably on the grounds that they are instruments of the inevitable, the means through which the inevitable realizes itself. They do not, however, seem to behave as if they held that resistance to their proselyting, refusal of unbelievers to accept their message, were also determined, inevitable, and even pardonable.

At any rate, our revolutionists all sought to spread the gospel of their revolution. What we now call “nationalism” is certainly present as an element in all these revolutionary gospels. But at least in the earlier years, and during the crisis of a revolution, crude notions of national expansion do not prevail. The lucky people to whom the gospel has been revealed wish to spread it properly abroad. In the Messianic fervor of the crisis period, aggressive nationalism is not on the surface. Underneath it doubtless helps drive the revolutionists on, and in the period of reaction it emerges into the light, barely if at all disguised as the “destiny” of a chosen people and its leader. The Jacobins announced they were bringing the blessings of freedom to all the people of the earth, and such is the power of imagination that some men still think of Napoleon as agent of the new freedom. The Bolsheviks are present to all our generation as great apostles of a world-wide revolution. Most of us can still remember the days when fearful folk in conservative lands looked under their beds each night for emissaries of Moscow.

The Calvinists as Christians, of course, were ardent proselyters. But the victorious English Independents were also capable of mixing their religious with political propaganda, were anxious to win the world over to their superior form of society. Cromwell’s famous collaborator, Admiral Blake, used to spread the gospel in foreign lands. Thanks to the example of England, Blake said, “All kingdoms will annihilate tyranny and become republics.” England had done so already. France was following in her wake; and as the natural gravity of the Spaniards rendered them somewhat slower, he gave them ten years. All Europe is shortly to be republican—and this in the 1650’s! Those who today boast or bemoan that soon the Western world will be all Communist, or all Fascist, or all Democratic, might ponder awhile the circumstances of this remark of Blake’s.

A good deal of ink and oratory has been expended over this effort of the extremists to propagate their faiths among the nations. Conservatives in other nations are naturally very suspicious. Moscow gold must be at the bottom of every liberal or radical movement; there is an organized international plot to establish the world-rule of atheistic Jacobinism and destroy Christianity. Probably in most cases these fears and suspicions are much exaggerated. The revolutionists are usually too poor, and too occupied at home, to devote more than a small part of their energies to these foreign missions. There are, moreover, in the other countries usually enough disgruntled natives to form a solid nucleus for revolutionary action. The importation into these countries of English, French, or Russian phrases and other revolutionary fashions is the most natural thing in the world.

At any rate, there is no doubt about the fact of the uniformity. Even in the seventeenth century, when the world was so much larger, so much slower to cross, the English revolution spread itself abroad. Edward Sexby at Bordeaux proposed to the French radicals a republican constitution which was to be called L’Accord du Peuple—an adaptation of the English Agreement of the People—and was obliged in consequence to flee the town. In Holland at the news of trouble in England, “the people began to take sides for one or the other of the parties and with such fervor that in many cases they came to blows.” This sounds a lot like the behavior of Federalists and Republicans in the United States in the 1790’s, when the French revolution provided most of the dramatic material of American politics. But the point need not be labored. Similar examples from the Russian revolution will occur to almost everyone.

The religious parallel may be pushed a bit further. Our revolutionists are convinced that they are the elect, destined to carry out the will of God, Nature, or Science. That feeling was particularly strong among the Russian Communists, where in pure logic it should be less strong than among the Calvinists, believers in a personal God. The opponents of these revolutionists are not just political enemies, not just mistaken men, grafters, log-rollers, or damned fools; they are sinners, and must not merely be beaten—they must be wiped out. Hence the justification of the guillotine and the firing-squad. For our revolutionists display that vigorous intolerance which in the logic of the emotions as well as in that of the intellect, follows perfectly on the conviction of being absolutely, eternally, monopolistically right. If there is but one truth, and you have that truth completely, toleration of differences means an encouragement to error, crime, evil, sin. Indeed, toleration in this sense is harmful to the tolerated, as well as very trying on the tolerator. As Bellarmine said, it is a positive benefit to obstinate heretics to kill them because the longer they live the more damnation they heap upon themselves.

These revolutionary faiths are very interesting in their eschatologies, their notions of final ends like heaven and hell. The English revolution was dominated by some of the wilder as well as by the more conventional of Christian eschatologies. The Millenarians expected the second coming year after year. The rule of the Saints was just around the corner. The Jacobins had a much less concrete notion of heaven, and this heaven was to be definitely here on earth—the republic of Virtue which we have seen as Robespierre’s ideal. After the dictatorship of the revolutionary government, this perfect republic was to appear, and Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, would be more than a slogan. To hardened Americans a republic doesn’t sound at all like a heaven, but we must believe that it was very different for the earnest Jacobin of 1794. The Russian heaven is the classless society, to be attained after the purgatory of the dictatorship of the proletariat has slowly put an end to the worldly miseries of the class struggle. It seems that even the Stalinists admit being still in purgatory. The specific content of life in the classless society is somewhat vaguely described by most Communists; and Marx himself, unlike Mohammed, went into no details about his heaven. There will be competition, one gathers, but no struggle, and certainly no struggle over economic goods. Competition will be on a lofty plane, as among artists. Perhaps there will be competition in love? At any rate, as in a more robust heaven, the old German Valhalla, the heroes will fight all day, but at night their wounds will heal.

All of these faiths were incorporated in social groups, and hence had rituals. The present writer has elsewhere described at some length the Jacobin ritual, a strange hodgepodge of Catholic, Protestant, classical and other elements, with Republican creeds, Republican baptisms and prayers, even with a revolutionary sign of the cross in the name of Marat, Le Pelletier, la liberté ou la mort. Communist ritual is less crudely imitative, and perhaps less rich. But it is just as definite, as you will find in talking to an initiated Communist. Marx’s Das Kapital, of course, is hardly ever read in orthodox circles except ritualistically. The French revolutionists had their saints and martyrs, especially the murdered Marat: the apotheosis of Lenin, clearly begun in his lifetime, has become a cult centered around his tomb in Moscow. Lenin is perhaps, like Jeremy Bentham preserved in University College, London, a purely secularist saint; but a saint he is. Stalin, we are told, has had to fight very hard the tendency of simple Russian folk to mix a certain amount of superstition with their natural devotion to their present great leader. He would not care to be classed with the old icons. Smaller groups, like the Communist Youth, are brought up in an atmosphere of ritual, are in this respect more like some of the social side-shows of our Protestant churches than like comparatively secular groups such as the Boy Scouts.

Religious symbolism goes along with this ritual, and was especially developed in France. During the Terror, one met symbolic devices everywhere: the eye of surveillance, seeking out the enemies of the Republic; the triangle of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; the Phrygian cap of liberty, the bonnet rouge; the carpenter’s level, symbolizing equality; any kind of mound, which served as symbol for the beneficent Mountain, the party that had carried out the revolution to its logical end. Most of these and many other symbols are to be found in the elaborate pageant of the 20th Prairial at Paris, when Robespierre personally supervised the festival of the Supreme Being. The Russians, aided by modern poster technique, have made a similar, if less pedantic, use of symbols to hold the people together in a Communist society.